She could not, surely, be troubling about Ada. It was he who had made the trouble there, insisting that Ada was “his job.”
He insisted to the point of almost literally forcing himself upon her in Peter Struggles’ house, and remembered now with a twinge that desolating interview, if interview it could be called, and its liberating end; how Ada had looked at him, and answered nothing to his abject and passionate appeals (he wondered how he could have made them, but he was despairingly sincere): how he had pleaded and apologized for the past and supplicated for the future, all in the mastering grip of his Marbeck faith, and how she had kept silent till she turned on Peter and told him she must leave a house which did not shelter her from the deadly insult of this man’s presence. He remembered the good woman, Mrs. Grandage, who had carried Ada to a Hydro at Southport, and wrote to Peter that Ada seemed quite happy there, “nursing her grievance like a child,” and was looking for a house. He had found something mystifying about the intervention of Mrs. Grandage: good nature fortified by a bad conscience was his attempt to explain her attitude, but what emerged clearly from the letters she wrote to Peter was that Ada had no intention of returning to Manchester: and when he thought of Southport, he realized its quintessential rightness as her home. He had not shirked his job; he had eaten dirt before her in his anxiety to do his job; and he was not allowed. What she was she must remain, and Southport seemed the aptest place for her. “Only,” as Mrs. Grandage wrote, “she mast have money.”
That was not difficult, and the money might have come in many ways: it came actually in a way which Effie hated and Sam thought exquisitely right. It came through Stewart, that faithful ally of the publishing business in its early days.
Dubby was in Effie’s room, “which is where,” he said, “your brother has a right to be.”
“He is to have whatever he wants,” she said.
“--that’s going,” he completed her sentence.
“Yes,” said Effie, not smiling now, and kissed him very simply to seal his brotherhood.
He stood silent for a moment, then, with a jerk of his head he, so to speak, cut his loss and turned to her with the frank confidence of their settled relationship. “Now we can talk,” he said. “Tell me about old Sam. What are you going to do with him? And with his business?”